How to Find Unlimited New Customers Using Artificial Intelligence (Marketing Secrets)

so the idea was really simple it’s like what if we built like google display network or facebook audience network for screens in the real world um so

we we built like a prototype for that and then we did what we kind of hatching called a reverse stealth mode we called everybody in the out of

home advertising industry which is tvs and bars and restaurants but it’s also ads in airports or billboards mass transit wrapped cars all this basically

everything that you see outside of your home um and it’s a 31 billion dollar industry that is the most archaic thing that i have ever seen my name is kevin david and if you want real financial freedom for yourselves and for your loved

ones today then the time is now and i will be there to help you every step of the way what is up guys and welcome back to another exciting episode of the kevin david experience um big shout out to everybody who’s been

leaving comments engaging with our brand new youtube channel we just started actually launching it on our big youtube channel as well as our new clips podcast channel so huge shout out to everybody who’s been supporting us there and a big shout out for everybody who supports us on

itunes or spotify or wherever you listen so thank you everybody who has been doing that and one other big thank you is the people who are actually sharing the podcast it means a lot to us um so today we have a special guest i know i always say that because it’s always true um sam who is joining us and told me he hasn’t actually gone to the barber in a year which is great so

you guys have to go to youtube to check out how sexy his beard looks so sam the first question we ask everybody on the podcast is kind of to describe um you know your entrepreneurial journey all the way up until right now uh in 60 seconds or less uh it’s a series of accidents uh i was hosting an am fm talk radio show about cigars at a bunch in tampa a bunch of cigar

folks wanted me to build websites for them which was fine but then they wanted me to help them make money with it which i didn’t know how to do so i hopped on google found this company called hubspot uh they had some pretty cool stuff i thought they’d be a cool team to work with but uh i was a college dropout with no experience so they’re a bunch of harvard and mit

nerds i built a landing page at hiremeethubspot.com to register for the free webinar on why you should hire me and then i use the free credits you get when you sign up with google facebook linkedin to run ads targeting their employees um i was in hospital for eight years ran hubspot labs uh ran our expansion lat am then i lived in a van for a year uh speaking uh on hubspot

behalf i was teaching at harvard taught at usf which is the school i dropped out of which was fun um then after eight years the hubspot execs helped me you know it’s time for me to move on uh found a new role uh chief foreign officer flock.com and then uh after flock um yeah accidentally launched

onescreen.ai which is where i am now i love that it’s so funny because you like so casually mentioned that you like you know uh targeted their employees with like ads and made like a landing page like basically like getting them to hire you like most people probably wouldn’t do that right

but that was like normal to you i mean if if you do what everyone else does you get what everyone else gets right and hubspot rejected most of their applicants and i was unqualified anyways at least on paper so when you know you’re you’re likely to fail it really frees you up to be more innovative

yeah that’s interesting and so you literally made like a website you made uh you were targeting them and so like were there employees actually seeing that did you like find their emails from some like source and then like upload

like a custom audience basically on on google and facebook that was like only targeting them or how did you do it this is way before all of that was an option um the so hubspot only had about 100 employees or so at the time so

i targeted everybody who liked the hubspot page and lived in boston uh which was you know they were a small company um and i did the linkedin stuff and then i did everybody who was googling the hubspot brand name

um to and also lived in boston because back then you had to check search rankings manually so i just sort of created coverage but um yeah it it only took me three hours and 26 minutes to get a call from the recruiter when i hit go i got leads for about a third of the company so it worked well that is

literally hilarious and so then you said you’re the chief revenue officer at a a company called what was it flock yeah flock.com um it was a really interesting startup out of uh out of india and the ceo um asked me if i wanted to take on google microsoft facebook and slack at the same time

with like an all-in-one uh collaboration and communication suite for mid-sized businesses that sounds familiar it’s because it was hubspot’s playbook um it was you know i’d always had an agreement with the hubspot founders and exec team that if i decided i wanted to leave that they’d help me find a

new role uh and so uh kip who was the cmo at hubspot was an advisor for this company um and uh he he introduced me to them and yeah i was there for about a year and a half and uh they’re they’re still cranking along they’re

still still doing really well there um but then obviously when when covet hit i got to lay off myself and and a few other people uh which was an interesting

experience but right and so what what ended up happening with with hubspot did you just kind of like were you kind of tired of of the role that you had or did you just kind of want to you know pursue other things or what did that look like um i wanted to go back to an early stage startup uh i like you know working with uh smaller teams i like being more agile and and you

know you start thinking in terms of years i was doing a lot of strategy planning for hubspot at the time which which was a lot of fun but um you know i wanted to i didn’t i knew i didn’t want to teach full-time at harvard or anything i i wanted to do work not talk about it um and so yeah we literally

created a trello board i had a freelancer uh create a prospecting list for every tech startup that was post series b and pre-ipo that didn’t have a cmo or cro uh and then uh added all of the hubspot execs and some other folks to a trello board where we sorted them by very professional categories of pretty

cool really cool and insanely cool um and then we just you know worked the network until we found which ones uh i thought i should talk to so it was um yeah it was it was just i wanted to go back to an earlier stage startup and it’s

now that i’m back at an early stage startup i’m questioning my sanity um but you know it’s uh it was it’s it’s fun i like it what do you what do you think the difference is between working at someone else’s startup that they founded

versus founding your own um the the breadth of pressure is a lot different right a defining characteristic of startups is there’s always more problems

than there are people and then there are bandwidth but when you’re not one of the founders and especially when you’re not the ceo the your job is to stay focused right if you whoever chases two ravage cass catches neither right even if you need both to survive you can still only chase one at a time

um i don’t know how i let my co-founders talk me into being the ceo because they all have these like narrowly scoped areas of responsibilities for either sales or engineering and then everything else either gets ignored or uh you know ends up being a problem that i have to solve like i i learned

about hr this uh you know last year which was fun yeah being like a being like a startup founder i feel like you have to be like the ceo the cmo the ceo the you know cfo head of hr yeah yeah it’s it’s an interesting experience i feel like you know there’s always pros and cons i feel like with

entrepreneurship now everyone’s kind of like really um like glamorized being like an entrepreneur and a founder right but like nobody ever really talks about like the negative aspects and like the pressure of like being

responsible for other people’s lives and things like that one thing that you said that was that was interesting is like you you just casually say these things that i think are really unique like which is a it’s a good attribute but

you said like you made like a a list of like every startup that like didn’t have like a ceo or a cmo or whatever like one of the questions that will that i’ll ask you in a bit we do like a rapid fire session so i guess i’ll just ask it now like what do you do when you’re feeling overwhelmed or you’re feeling like you

don’t know where to start it seems like you do like what i do which is like you create like really detailed well-thought-out lists but i’d be interested to hear you know your thoughts on on how you kind of approach uh problems

or or you know when you’re when you’re feeling like you don’t know what to do like what do you do uh when i feel like i don’t know what to do it’s

usually because there’s too much to do there’s too many options uh i don’t usually run into you know i don’t i literally don’t know where to begin or how to approach or solve a situation because you just take like the next step that you know about um my my biggest thing is the best life advice comes from

airline safety videos which is secure your own mass before assisting others it doesn’t mean you don’t care about like the baby in the seat next to you but whoever is relying on you can’t is screwed if you can’t breathe um so you

know even with the team right now it’s like solve one problem at a time don’t solve problems you don’t have yet uh and just be okay with the fact that you have to like take things like you can scope it out into a big list but then you

have to take it in chunks um so i i generally think about the entire problem and then i categorize literally things that we’re going to ignore that we know

strategy playbook omissions and timeline and targets uh the omissions is like stuff we know matters but we have all jointly agreed we’re not gonna actually work on right now yeah yeah and i think that’s interesting that i was recently reading a book that that mentioned um maslow’s hierarchy of fires

which is kind of like it’s kind of like which fires you like prioritize similar to like your you know baseline needs as a human like shelter and you know

food things like that but kind of in like the opposite twist because you know with startups or life in general right there’s always going to be more

problems than you kind of have to solve and so like one important part of like prioritizing is not only prioritizing what to do but prioritizing like what not to do also which i think a lot of people kind of get wrong and so what

what about one screen can you tell us like and you know to uh to a layman or somebody who doesn’t know as much about marketing as as we do that

what exactly does one screen actually do what’s the problem it solves yeah so again one screen was an accident um at the end when kova was starting uh we knew a bunch of small businesses were going to be screwed and so a

few hubspot colleagues we got together for just a hackathon to try and help small businesses and we’re sitting in a cigar lounge in boston and the tv’s turned off but even it’s turned on it’s showing commercials but the

commercials suck and the business isn’t getting any money for it so the idea was really simple it’s like what if we built like google display network or facebook audience network for screens in the real world um so we built like

a prototype for that and then we did what we kind of hatching they called a reverse stealth mode we called everybody in the out of home advertising industry um which is tvs and bars and restaurants but it’s also ads in airports

or billboards mass transit wrapped cars all this basically everything that you see outside of your home um and it’s a 31 billion dollar industry that is the most archaic thing that i have ever seen uh there’s no like directory of who

owns all the billboards and like where they are like if you just wanted to buy every billboard within 50 miles of tampa you wouldn’t be able to without calling 100 companies uh and so we decided to uh yeah like quit all of our jobs and and see if we could due to real world media what you know google

did to the internet which is organize the information and make it useful and then do what amazon did for the buying experience right like you should be able to just buy everything that you need all in one place um and it’s weird

because i had only bought billboards once in my career i’m sorry twice and once was just to piss off a competitor um but now like i love it because i wish i had known all these things were options right like there’s so many cool things that you can do beyond just like a b testing another set of copy

for your google adwords campaigns right like we’re all tired of that that’s that’s so like when you i mean first of all that’s a great idea right because like there’s so many like lounges and things that just have like broken tvs or

like they have some like goofy ad that no one has any idea what it is or like even like 24 hour fitness like theirs are like run by them and it’s still goofy

like um so it’s a it’s a great idea how do you actually like approach that right because that’s a very big problem so i mean you know are you calling all these businesses are you trying to like basically make it so easy self sign up that the businesses are incentivized monetarily to actually do it themselves

like what’s the approach that that you take um you know to kind of try to get businesses to sign up and then to both because it’s like a marketplace right you have to you have to tell the people who want to buy the ads right and

then you also have to tell the businesses who are going to show the ads yeah so you know marketplaces have the chicken and the egg problem the good thing about uh this industry is we don’t have to solve the supply side problem because there’s already it already exists unlike amazon had to

create e-commerce from scratch um and 50 of the inventory just goes unsold every month which is an economic aberration that should not exist uh that’s just because they don’t know how to do how to do sales and pricing

uh and then on the demand side for advertisers i mean i’ve spent 15 years as a marketer marketing to marketers about marketing i once sent an email that said i know that you know that i know that you opened that email and didn’t

click the link uh you know so we’re we’re pretty good at that um but uh it’s honestly i’ll tell you the biggest mistake we made over the last year was overthinking the problem like we thought we had to come into this space

and fight facebook because facebook has a place based advertising team at least because they tried to hire our cto andre to run their engineering team for it um and we you know wanted to build all this cool machine learning optimization for outcomes and you know we’ve got a liquor store who’s an

advertiser there are three percent of people who go to the liquor store and they go to work super interested to find out who they are that was the original concept is like if it thinks you’re on your way to work don’t show you now to get you go to a liquor store um but we’ve had to you know strip it back man which is like there’s no again there’s no directory we have the only directory of all of the billboard owners and stuff like that in the united states

and how to call them just because we scraped all the state permit websites um you know so solving the most basic problem at a time and not doing if you’ve seen the pursuit of happiness it’s the example i used with the team

that movie uh where it’s a machine that takes a slightly better picture but costs like 10x as much that’s what most startups do is they build something that’s really cool and really powerful but it doesn’t actually solve the core

problem of you know i could give you perfect analytics but if you still had to call 40 companies and it took six weeks to act on it you wouldn’t do it right and so so the simplest problem right because i’m going to kind of rephrase this question because i’m actually really interested to hear your answer like

this the simplest problem is businesses need like a way to very easily display something that other that they’re getting some share of revenue for right

because i mean if it was my if it was my business i would make like this self-service option so simple that a business could come they could do like one basic thing they could show whatever they want on their screen with very little tech and that they would make some percentage of that revenue right kind of how like google adwords did for websites and then you basically you know once you kind of create that self-service you scrape every freaking business ever you know technologically and then you like tell them hey you could be making money doing no work is like how i would approach it like what are your thoughts on that and what’s what’s wrong with what i what

with what i just said no i mean you’re spot on right it’s we should be able to design experiences for customers for the real in the real world the same way we do it online um like we had one chain of bowling alleys that just wanted to be able to hit a button and say i want to sell more bud light this week and have the right content show on the right screen so it might be uh for your

business nurturing content for your own business uh or it might be you know you sell ads which is you know a way to make money off of uh an audience that you’ve gathered online just like you can do um in uh in the real world um

and it’s just it’s just something that people don’t know is an option right it’s something that they don’t they that people don’t necessarily think about and you know we all talk about we want to help small businesses but that that business model has to evolve um there’s other interesting things too like i like we’re super bullish on how do we make this a privacy-centric thing uh there are interesting like tools that we want to plug in where what small

businesses have is they people actually care about them right and what if how would it like change the world if the cigar lounge that i care about making money if you could market to me there as effectively or as creepily as

you could as you can on facebook today but then if i go to walmart you can’t all the all the ad units are dumb right so like what if we gave what if we gave people the ability to control how much information a company had and

could use about them uh based on you know what whether or not they actually care about that company having that data and being able to use it yeah i love that um cool so this this section is is called on the spot so uh there’s like five or six uh questions that we that we ask um the answers are supposed to be 60 seconds or less um so you know you don’t have to like rush through it or anything but they’re supposed to be like kind of quicker uh

so the first question is what is the one book or mindset lesson that most greatly influenced your life uh there’s a book called i think it’s literally just

called platform strategy by a guy named marshall van olstein um which completely just changed the way i think about how you design businesses and strategies and markets um it touches on amazon and and a bunch of

companies that have become really big and how platforms are eating the world i mean innovators dilemma by clay christensen was awesome sales acceleration formula by mark roberts you’ve got to read but um all of those are just teaching me how to do things i knew i should be doing better uh the platform strategy concept uh which is how what our strategy is built on that was totally new that was mind-blowing i love that i’m looking i’m googling it

right now is it by laura claire relier uh marshall van allstein is the author’s name it’s might be platform revolution something like that sorry i should have looked it up oh yeah platform revolution i see it yeah i always look it up because i’m gonna i’m gonna end up reading that um cool so the next one is

what tools or software or apps could you not live without um i mean conveniently we have a free subscription to hubspot uh otherwise i don’t know how people run startups without you know basic analytics and

dashboards and having to do all this crap people need to remember that’s doing a startup now is a lot harder than it was 10 years ago it’s more

competitive there’s more professional discipline and theory around it and you can’t you can’t hack together some solutions uh to make that work um

but the big stuff is con communications right so without trello zoom slack and g suite we’re we’re screwed right like there’s not like we all just come come grinding to it to a total and complete halt yeah it’s so true i use base camp for for everything and i can’t even imagine doing anything without it

yeah um cool the next question is if you could teach everyone in the world one concept what would you teach them uh if i could teach everybody in the world one concept that’s tough i i’m actually going to go with not the like business lesson angle because there’s plenty of those the one concept i

want to teach people is that don’t don’t solve problems you don’t have yet don’t fire yourself from a job you haven’t applied for yet this is my biggest piece of advice i give to younger professionals is it is the hiring manager’s job to tell if you’re not a good fit for a role it’s your job to know if the role is a

good fit for you which your job’s hard enough don’t do theirs too same with like entrepreneurship or like i’ve never applied for a job that i was qualified for including this one um like the whole world is designed to let you know if it doesn’t think you’re good enough or if it doesn’t think you’re ready uh and we spend a lot of time doing and worrying about whether or not uh we’re going to get that feedback just like trust me if you’re not ready to do

something the world will let you know otherwise just keep moving forward and and you’ll you’ll find that that you really get to do some interesting things i love that um cool the next question is uh what was the lowest point

of your career as an entrepreneur and how did you get through it um the lowest point of my career as an entrepreneur last year was hard with having to do some layoffs we staffed up planning for a growth trajectory that wasn’t going to happen for a number of reasons uh having to i mean you think things you don’t want you didn’t think you’d have to think about how do we coordinate you know hundreds of people working from home across the

globe especially with a startup that was based in india and not everybody has good internet infrastructure at home um you know everybody’s like scared and worried like how do you keep people calm that was that was the hardest week of my professional career right it’s like how do you be sensitive

to the fact that like people want to go home to their families but you like you’re trying to tell them please don’t do that because you will probably kill your elderly relatives if you do it’s just it’s stuff we didn’t think we’d have to

worry about and stuff that was uh business critical operations um you know that was that fortunately we started doing a dry run of what would happen if

the entire company had to work from home the week before everybody had to start working from home um but that week getting that set up and dealing with the stress um you know and the strain and the concern that the the people on the team had um it was tough that was tough right like you we

don’t think about that being our problem to solve but there was a great quote that like people aren’t at home working uh they’re at home like during a crisis trying to work um and that is uh that was that was a tough week for me but but you know we made it through it we made good decisions everybody i had to lay off i because i also laid myself off uh we found a new job for um which uh you know so it was a tough week but it ended up good i

love it uh so last two questions uh what is the worst advice most people listen to worst advice most people listen to is um this hustle nonsense like the fact that you have to be busy all the time or that you just have to work harder or um one like your your uh intelligence in your your just like reserves

are a limited resource right and it’s better it’s more important to decide what not to do two and i have this argument with my co-founder greg all the time because he is just an animal who never stops um but you need some time to like take like i used to think it was so dumb when halligan who’s the founder

at hubspot would like say that he needed to take time on the cape to think about things but there really is like your job when you’re a startup you don’t know the answers you have to take some time to think about things and we end up just doing so much activity that we don’t actually come up with what’s an optimal solution or what’s what’s like a really good idea in our career professionally at home like the people i see who are who are actually

successful are not the people who just constantly spend time throwing activity at a wall it’s people who take time like you like you mentioned earlier to like plan out and think about a meaningful approach and then and then execute on that with intensity but just constantly going is not i don’t know

how we managed to convince ourselves that was a good idea yeah i’m reading ted turner’s autobiography and he said a fool with a plan is better than a genius with no plan um cool so the last question is what does happiness mean to you what does happiness mean to me man yes tough questions um like uh i like it when i do work that big that that i’m proud of

right so i’ll use hubspot as an example we you know yeah we had microsoft as a customer but adding like 0.

1 percent to their earnings report was a ton of money but it wasn’t the same as the guy who had like a store in kalamazoo michigan who like bet all of his money on hubspot and then you know told us that we single-handedly put

his daughter through college right or um my barber shop in boston that i obviously have not been to in a really long time um you know being able to do one of those giant checks which they really do have by the way you can buy those um you know for some month for money to to him when we launched our pilot program in boston um you know that’s the kind of stuff

that that i like it’s one of the reasons i like the industry i’m in now is it’s almost entirely small businesses and used by small businesses and built by small businesses on the supply side it’s not clear channel in those companies that almost the inventory and uh and and also with with individuals right my wife jokes that i’d love to be small business batman um unfortunately the people who can most benefit from our help are the ones who can generally at least afford it um but you like having a meaningful

impact so if i get hit by an asteroid i can go to the great crm in the sky knowing that uh like i had like a good a good impact not on the work that i did but on the people that i that i was able to help do good work themselves that that makes me happy i really enjoy that i love it me 100 too so if people want to learn more about uh one screen or about you what’s what’s the best way to do that uh the great thing about my last name is it was easy to do the

seo for so google anything close to mollycarjunon you’ll probably find me or you can go check out onescreen.ai just don’t blame our new head of marketing for it he just recently started the website was made by me hubspot had a wonderful design team but i wasn’t on it so um but yeah you

can check out onescreen.ai uh or you can you know find me on twitter linkedin i’m always happy to chat help any other startups that i can cool

thanks so much man it was a great podcast we really appreciate your time and stay safe out there in the pandemic you too kevin take care take care brother

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